The decisions to place public art pieces at the six stations on the new TRAX line was far from an afterthought. In fact, it was just the latest iteration of a longstanding collaboration between Utah Transit Authority (UTA) and Salt Lake City’s Public Arts program, which is part of the Salt Lake City Arts Council (SLCAC). They have partnered on art installations at 20 stations since 1998. UTA includes funding for art in its budget for new lines and Salt Lake City matches it. Together they select the projects, which are then managed by the Public Arts program. UTA makes sure that art designs comply with transit safety regulations and are compatible with the operation of trains and the flow of people using them.

According to Brandon Bott at UTA, the transit agency “sees public art as an important way to build a sense of community ownership for TRAX and FrontRunner rail stations. It provides communities with an opportunity to express their identity — who they are, where they come from and what values they hold — through art. UTA and the Federal Transit Administration appreciate the role art can play in making rail stations into more attractive, vibrant spaces, which is important to building ridership.” UTA now has public art in 45 stations — almost three quarters of all UTA rail stations.

Roni Thomas, who heads the city’s public arts program, explained the process of soliciting and selecting public art for the airport line: Two of the six stations on the line (850 W. and 1950 W.) were opened to proposals by Utah artists. Artists for the remaining four stations were selected from a national call for qualified artists and interviews by a selection committee. It just so happens that one of those selected is also a Utah artist.

Though the selection committee was open to all sorts of ideas, “we wanted to capture the neighborhoods,” said Thomas. “We wanted each station to reflect its particular neighborhood – the natural environment and the built environment.”

Ruby Chacon, who is known as a community activist as well as a gifted painter, was charged with developing a station art project that would involve the diverse community around 850 West, as well as reflect the character of the community. She worked with the Mestizo Institute to help conceive the project using community surveys and interviews. Then, she worked with apprentice artists from the community to actually paint the panels that are part of the art installation.

Young people from the Mestizo Arts and Activism Youth Collective gathered data from surveys and focus groups. They asked members of the community what kinds of symbols and stories best represent them. “We were trying to get from the community the kinds of images that would make them feel comfortable,” Chacon explained. A graduate student in the group compiled the more than 500 responses into reports.

Chacon and her apprentices studied the data reports to determine themes and images. Then they created sketches and studies. Sifting through all the data and creating a visual sense of it was the hardest part of the project, says Chacon. “It could seem overwhelming…so much imagery and so many details.”

Ultimately, they organized images around the past, present, and future of three themes: arts, experiential knowledge and education, and rebuilding Utah. They collaged their images together to form the mural. Once the design was approved, they projected the images on the prepared metal plates and painted them in Chacon’s living room, barely finishing before her lease expired and she had to move.

The resulting art piece is a mural, painted with acrylic on metal and sandwiched between the glass of the windscreen on the station platform. Though the mural is broken into segments, it flows from frame to frame as one image. There are images on both sides of the metal and therefore visible from trains going in both directions. For those passengers arriving and departing trains on that platform, there’s more to see up close: four poems submitted by youth and adults from the community.

Sculptor Darl Thomas, who calls himself a “minimalist” sculptor and is represented locally by A Gallery in Salt Lake City, was selected to produce art for the Power Station stop, which is next to the Rocky Mountain Power facility at 1407 West. His design process included trips to the Utah archives to look for historic images of the power plant and the mechanical parts that go into it. “I found out that Salt Lake City was the fifth city in the world to have a central generating plant,” says Thomas. He also found photographs of transmission towers, which, he says, have always attracted him for their sculptural aesthetic.

He made a model of a sleek, abstracted transmission tower that could serve as a central feature of his installation. Though the design didn’t quite fit the station platform environment, Rocky Mountain Power liked it and asked Thomas to build it and install it on their property for their Centennial celebration last year.

Meanwhile, Thomas’s approved design for the station platform includes stainless steel and bronze caps, made to look like hydroelectric generators, that fit over three round concrete benches. It also includes images of wires and electric insulators etched into glass windscreens. The glass panels have alternating positive and negative images for the wires and insulators. And there’s a surprise for in-the-know members of the community: a small fox near the bottom of one glass panel, commemorates the fox farm that used to be near Diamond Lil’s restaurant location off of North Temple.

The third Utah artist whose work is included on the new airport TRAX line is Shawn Porter. Reflecting on the 1950 West station, which serves the Utah State Library for the Blind and Disabled, as well as the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, Porter decided to reference the nearby wetlands of the Jordan River and the Great Salt Lake in his design. Thus, his sculpture uses stainless steel, copper, and bronze to suggest the wetlands of the Great Salt Lake.

Sections of pipe are welded together to represent reed grasses coming out of a surface of stainless steel polished to simulate a water surface. Copper spheres and hemispheres suggest river rock, while three bronze birds represent the wildlife of this special Utah habitat.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the sculpture is the text in the surface of the stainless steel surrounding the reed grasses, which describes in poetic prose the Great Salt Lake. The text is in Braille to enable blind TRAX patrons to interpret the sculpture and also learn something about the Great Salt Lake. This part of the sculpture was also the most challenging and frustrating, says Porter. “When I had the stainless steel plate cut, I had rectangular plates cut out of the surface. “ He wrote the description, had it translated into Braille with help from staff at the University of Utah’s Marriott Library, and then had a machinist cut holes for each of the Braille characters. The holes were then filled with little pins that allow the blind person to read it.

Porter had never welded stainless steel, so he was challenged to weld the text plates into the rest of the stainless steel surface without contaminating the stainless with bits of other steel that could cause rust marks. He wanted the entire surface to be perfectly smooth and seamless, except for the Braille text, which offers sighted viewers an interesting textural contrast. “Visually it’s interesting because it’s essentially a language floating on the surface,” says Porter. “Also, it references the way our environment contains stories.”

As part of the creative process, Porter made some samples of the Braille text and asked Braille readers at the Marriott Library to try them out and tell him which hardware was the easiest to read.

The writing itself was also challenging. “I realized I was basing the description [of the Great Salt Lake] on visual reference, what it looks like,” says Porter. “But then I shifted my approach to bring in some of the tactile aspects of being on the Great Salt Lake.” He broke it down into geographical areas of the lake and included sounds (water slapping against a boat), smells (like ocean), and feel (tall grasses brushing against arms).

These three Utah artists with their firsthand knowledge of the area could be expected to share vibrant stories of the Westside neighborhoods. But even the out-of-state artists whose works are installed at the other three airport line stations did their homework and have stories to tell.

Catherine Widgery of Cambridge, MA, designed “Crystal Light” for the North Temple Bridge/Guadalupe Station. Her work attempts to capture the energy of the city and its people through light and reflections of color and movement in the surrounding environment.

Nancy Gutkin O’Neill of New Orleans, LA designed “Fairpark Convergence” for the Fairpark Station after researching the Fairpark neighborhood. Her work is a glass collage of maps, images, and fabric that evokes the ethnic diversity of the area, as well as of the geology and the area.

Gordon Heuther of Napa, CA was selected for the Airport Station. His design references Utah’s red rock canyons with it’s burnt orange steel plates cut in a mountain range silhouette that is part of the fencing separating the platform from the street. Spaces between the steel plates give motorists a feeling of a moving picture as they drive by.

Of course, the public art will be there for you to see anytime you zip to the airport on TRAX. But April 19 is your perfect opportunity to leisurely stroll the line on a free pass and to learn the stories, starting with the exhibition at Mestizo. Hope to see you there.

In conjunction with the Salt Lake Arts Council, Artists of Utah presents Art in Transit and West Side Stories Friday, April 19, 6-9 pm.
Start at Mestizo Gallery, 641 West North Temple, Salt Lake City, UT for Erik Daenitz’s photographic history of the Westside along the TRAX line, and then travel the new airport TRAX line, stopping at each station to view public art. The first 200 patrons will receive free tickets courtesy of UTA.

Local artist and writer Bridgette Meinhold can capture the nuts and bolts of a place, as well as its mood. Both skills lend themselves to her latest endeavors. She recently published her first book, Urgent Architecture – 40 Sustainable Housing Solutions for a Changing World, where she writes about sustainable housing in the context of natural disasters. One section is dedicated to innovative housing built to withstand catastrophes brought on by Mother Nature. Meinhold, who enjoys depicting anything but a blue sky in her artwork, is also currently part of a two-person show at Gallery MAR, Atmospheric Intentions, which opened on March 29.

From a very young age, Meinhold was drawn to the arts. But as someone who is equally right-brained and left-brained she pursued other interests in college. Originally from Oklahoma City, she earned an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from San Diego State University. She was lured to Park City by Utah’s world-famous powder, and found another reason to make it her home when she fell in love. But before settling down in her small A-Frame cabin in the hills above Park City, she went to Stanford and earned her masters degree in civil and environmental engineering with a focus on sustainability.

When she returned to the Beehive State, Meinhold worked as a sustainability consultant and later became a freelance writer for Inhabitat.com, where she writes about green design and architecture. “Along the way I also came to the realization that what I really, truly wanted to do was be an artist. My husband was really supportive of that and he built me an art studio out of a 40-foot shipping container,” Meinhold says. In the August 2011 edition of 15 Bytes, Kelly Green snapped a photo essay of the unique space. Meinhold shares the studio with her husband. He uses half of it as a workshop, where one of his projects is creating custom frames from reclaimed barn wood for her artwork. In her half of the space, Meinhold creates encaustic landscapes.

“I found encaustic through a workshop here in Park City at Spiro Arts. Discovering encaustic felt like coming home. It was a medium that resonated with me and I felt like it had a lot of potential. I could have stuck with oil or acrylic and honed my technique and found my style but there’s something about the Encaustic that was really interesting, and I felt like I could experiment with it a lot and kind of create something that maybe had never been done before,” Meinhold says.

Meinhold’s images of sprawling wilderness, rugged mountain peaks, and rolling fog, capture a sense of place, specifically the area surrounding her home and Park City. “I think what people like about my work is that it kind of feels like Park City, it feels like the area and so I think especially if they don’t live here they can take a bit of Park City home with them. What I’m doing is preserving memories. Each of these paintings comes from my own images and my own experiences. I’m trying to recreate that feeling of what it was at that moment and just like everybody’s memories, they’re hazy, and you make not remember all the details, but maybe you remember specific details, so that’s what I’m trying to do with my work,” Meinhold says.

In her latest show at Gallery MAR, Atmospheric Intentions, Meinhold will be showing work alongside her mentor Shawna Moore. The title helped both artists to set an intention for their work, and Meinhold explores the theme from several different angles with an emphasis on capturing the mood. “First we look at it from what’s physical: what the air is doing, what the clouds are doing and then afterwards it’s about creating what the mood is,” Meinhold says. “(My work) tends to be on that moody, sort of melancholy side, because the atmospheres that tend to create the most interest for me are not the blue days. Everybody can take a picture of a blue day, but fog to me is very interesting. I love watching it, and where we live, we’re often actually in the fog, just in the clouds, and we get to see that a lot. I find that really fascinating, seeing it change and move across the mountains like a curtain closing on a stage.” She notes that depending on the day and the light, the atmosphere can change the mood of a place and the way it is perceived by people.

Meinhold has been showing her work at Gallery MAR since 2010, and during that same year that she was approached by a publisher to write a book. They were familiar with her writing from Inhabitat.com and she had written a handful of book reviews for them. “They asked me if I wanted to write the book and I said ‘Yes please,” Meinhold says. Just as Meinhold explores atmosphere in her artwork, the book explores sustainable housing in the context of moodier skies that can devastate homes. Meinhold tackled Urgent Architecture – 40 Sustainable Housing Solutions for a Changing World by dividing the book in to five specific chapters. “I wanted to write about emergency houses, temporary shelters, prefab, affordable housing, and then innovative houses that were built specifically to withstand disasters. So within those five categories I was able to look for specific projects and I was trying to find projects that not many people had seen before and also had actually been built. I didn’t want any renderings of concepts, I wanted houses and shelters that somebody had actually made and could prove that yes, this works,” Meinhold says.

The book features homes from around the world, including the Windcatcher House in Bluff, UT. The home was built by students involved with Design Build Bluff, a non-profit organization that builds sustainable homes on the Navajo reservation in the area. Meinhold selected the home for her chapter on innovative houses. It’s built off-grid and features a unique heating and cooling system built around a central hearth. “In the winter you run a fire in there, and because it has earth walls, that heat spreads throughout the house. And then in the summer, they rely on principles of backwards cooling. They change out a couple of things in the tower, the hearth, and they put these pads inside the tower,” she says. The pads are kept wet through the use of a drip line and when air passes over them cool air comes down through the hearth and into the house.

“I chose the Windcatcher House because of some of the more interesting building techniques that the students chose to use, and also because it’s in the desert. A lot of people are moving toward this region and living in the desert. I wanted to show that yes, you can build really sustainable houses despite the weather,” she says. Among the 40 homes, she also features one in Southeast Asia that rises with floodwater and a temporary shelter conceived by a group of female architects based in New York who designed a structure that can be built from shipping pallets.

“Architecture already has a lot of answers that we need to provide for ourselves and we just really need to implement them and be smart about it,” Meinhold says. “What I would really like is for local and state governments to start stepping up and making plans for natural disasters and emergency preparedness. It’s time for us to start thinking about it.” She practices what she preaches and lives in a modest cabin with a small “footprint.” It’s built to withstand the weather conditions of Park City and the A-frame design naturally sheds snow. Her nearby studio, mentioned earlier, is made from a reclaimed shipping container.

Another book may be in Meinhold’s future, but for now she will continue to write for Inhabitat.com and create art in an atmosphere where she hopes for positive change through green architecture.

Urgent Architecture – 40 Sustainable Housing Solutions for a Changing World is available through local bookstores, and was released in March 2013. Atmospheric Intentions will be on display at Gallery MAR through April 12. Gallery MAR is located on 436 Main Street in Park City.